A couple of weeks ago, The Libertarian Enterprise published an
article I wrote called
"I Told You So", about a young Tallahassee,
Florida woman who was ordered by her doctor, a state's attorney, and a
judge to remain in a hospital against her will because they had all
decided that the fetus she was carrying possessed more rights than she
does. The action was taken despite a privacy clause in the Florida
constitution that recognizes an individual right to refuse medical
treatment.

What made these events significant to me was that I had predicted,
in one of my novels, that if anti-abortionists got their way, in the
punitive statist climate that has developed in America during the past
couple of decades, it could ultimately result in the incarceration of
women suspected of not wanting to be pregnant, or accused of drinking,
smoking, or other activity deemed by authorities to be harmful to the
fetus.

The Florida woman was a smoker.

That's all there was to it. I had predicted a certain phenomenon,
and that phenomenon had come to pass. Period. So I was surprised to
receive a couple of extremely emotional responses from readers that
went far beyond anything I had written, either in the article or the
novel. While I support any woman's absolute right to control her body
and any products of her body, it is not my favorite issue to write
about, and I am annoyed to have to do it again. I have a strong
opinion about religion, too, but I never write about it if I can avoid
it.

Elsewhere
in this issue of The Libertarian Enterprise, you'll
see one of the messages sent to me, published with the permission of
its author, Steve Lynes, whose amiability and honesty made me feel an
obligation to write back to him. He isn't likely to like what I write
in reply, but the obligation I feel doesn't include sugar coating the
truth.

Steve starts off with a naked, unsupported assertion: "The so-
called 'fetus' that you refer to (a human being to me) has natural
rights, or God-given depending on your perspective, just like the
mother does." Steve's implication seems to be that I am somehow trying
to diminish the ethical status of the entity in questionor perhaps
more importantly, to deny him a point he wishes to make without having
to properly argue in its favorby referring to it by its correct
name.

However, Dictionary.com, in this case citing the 2010 Random House
Dictionary, defines "fetus" as: "noun ... (used chiefly of viviparous
mammals) the young of an animal in the womb or egg, esp. in the later
stages of development when the body structures are in the recognizable
form of its kind, in humans after the end of the second month of
gestation".

Believing he's gotten away with this "stolen concept", he rushes
on: "Unfortunately due to all the feminists pushing 'choice' (for the
mother that is) the rights of the baby are ignored." The trouble with
this idea (aside from an attempted well-poisoning by dragging "all the
feminists" into it) is that a fetusnot a baby yetis incapable
of making any choice, and that its incapability in no way negates the
woman's right to make choices about how her own body is going to be
used.

"Who is going to advocate for the baby's rights?" he asks a bit
rhetorically, seeing that he, himself, is doing it. "Who is going to
stand up for the baby's life?" The fact is that no one should be doing
it because there is no baby yet, and the object he's defending has no
rights.

"I believe in allowing someone to live their life as they see
fit," Steve informs us with grand generosity, "as long as they harm no
one else in the process but in this instance the mother is harming
someone else, the baby. Many automatically and incorrectly (also
immorally in my opinion) discount the baby's choice, the baby's
rights, and the baby's life when they support or elect to have an
abortion."

What baby?

What choice?

What rights?

"Yes a woman should have a choice," Steve tells us, "as we all
should, to include the baby." In other words, we are perfectly free to
chooseas long as each of us chooses "correctly" to agree with
Steve.

Gee, thanks, Steve.

But now things take a much uglier turn. Steve exposes himself a
little more than he most likely intended, when he writes, "In a
rational and moral society, after she made that first choice, the
choice to willingly spread her legs and have unprotected sex, her
choices should end if she happens to become pregnant from her act of
coupling."

Is it just me, or are these the words of someone who hates sex,
women who enjoy sex, or both? "She made her bed and now needs to deal
with the consequences of her actions and assume responsibility for
them."

Which is what she may be doing by responsibly declining to bring
an unwanted fetus to term. How many abused, battered, and murdered
children are a result of religion or the state forcing women to bear
them? Where did you get your morality, Steve, from a box of Cracker
Jack?

"She could have chosen," Steve goes on, "to not have sex, to have
her partner wear a condom, to have an IUD emplaced, to take birth
control, to use a diaphragm, foam, etc., etc." Sure she could, but
it's her body and she doesn't need someone like Steve peeking in the
bedroom window, offering advice. Who the hell appointed him the Sex
Police?

In all the yearsdecades, actuallythat I've been debating
with various individuals over this issue, all but perhaps one or two
of them have wound up, in the end, sort of pathetically betraying
themselves as examples of deep and bitter sexual resentmentand
envytoward others. That's a reason I hate arguing with them about
it.

Steve isn't any different from the others. "But when she chooses,"
he declares, "to be irresponsible and just plain lazy in many
instances by having unprotected sex, then she gives up her ability to
make further choices on the issue (besides giving the baby up for
adoption) because at that point another life has been thrown into the
equation."

He adds, "Abortion is murder, pure and simple."

Somebody needs to tell Steve that he has proven nothing with this
psychologically revealing antisexual tirade, and the fact that people
may occasionally conceive, by accident, while enjoying recreational
intimacy, in no way proves that reversing that conception constitutes
the wrongful death of a human being, which is the proper definition of
murder.

Disingenuously conflating the phenomenon of life in general with a
human life in particular is an old trick of Steve's anti-abortion
allies, but it won't wash here. According to a signboard along the
highway between here and Colorado Springs, "Abortion stops a beating
heart".

So does a rat trap.

Steve goes on: "Abortion clinics should be closed down and doctors
who practice that black art should be tried and imprisoned if found
guilty."

Black art? I suppose cameras steal our souls, too.

"I don't think we need to legislate or regulate any additional
laws or rules regarding the act," he says. "There are already plenty
of laws and rules enough to deal with murder, we just need to make it
known that this act is another of the many forms of murder and will be
prosecuted."

And how do we "make it known", except by additional legislation or
regulation? Do we just declare it, or do we get to follow due process,
here?

"If a woman chooses to have a back alley abortion that is her
prerogative but she needs to know that it is immoral and vile [Why,
because Steve says so?] and if she is found out she will be charged
and tried." Meaning that it's not her prerogative after all, then, is
it? Not if she's going to be arrested by the Sex Police. With every
word he writes, Steve brings us closer to my original police state
predictions.

The next logical steps to follow, of course, are preemptive
arrest, preventive detention, and protective custody for the fetus, as
I predicted, and exactly like what happened to the young woman from
Tallahassee.

For some reason, Steve yields to a compulsion to add, "I do
believe that women should be able to save their own lives in a medical
emergency but other than that there is no excuse to murder an innocent
child."

Now hang on a minute. Even if the woman is doomed to die a nasty,
prolonged, and agonizing death, how is that the fault of an innocent
child? Haven't we been arguing over a right it possesses to life,
liberty, and pursuit of happiness? Why should it have to pay for the
clumsiness, stupidity, lack of forethought, and just plain rotten luck
of its mother? Isn't that more consistent with what Steve has been
peddling? Ditto for rape and abortion, of course. Consistency is
important.

You don't really want me on your side, Steve, trust me.

And yet he demands of me, "How can you always advocate for the
rights, freedom, and liberties of everyone yet exclude the most
innocent and defenseless among us?" More stolen concepts. "Again I ask
who will defend and advocate for the rights of the innocent baby, will
you?"

Of course if the rights of an innocent baby were truly involved, I
would defend them. I have written more than almost anybody about the
way the U.S. government murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent
children by blockading Iraq. If it's a non-sapient item of a woman's
property I'm being pushed into sacrificing her rights for, then forget
it.

Look: as a result of two or three billion years of evolution, we
are all disposed to see young crittersbaby chicks, little bunnies,
puppy dogs and kittens as cute, to be protective toward them, to feel
pity for them. We don't perceive our own young any differently. We see
their great big blue eyes, their tiny button noses, their little bitty
toes and fingers, and something goes all mushy deep inside the best of
us.

A fetus does look a lot like the human baby it might potentially
become. That doesn't mean it's sapient or has rights. As Ayn Rand
observed, to sacrifice an actualitya living, breathing, thinking,
wholly formed and finished human femaleto a mere potentiality is
obscene.

A sapient organism has to get past things like that in order to
survive, not build a whole moral or political philosophy around it.
Pioneer kids learned to do it, and farm kids still learn the same
thing today. Hunting taught me that there's nothing more delicious
than a fawn (sorry, Bambi) and my favorite Italian dinner is veal
Marsala.

Experience has taught me that abortions sometimes save lives.

I have long thoughtbut seldom said, out of courtesy to friends
who disagree with methat passionate opposition to a woman's right
to control her body and all of its products is the result of nothing
moreexactly like evolution denial and animal rights advocacythan
sloppy thinking. Our friend Steve has failed to convince me
otherwise.

Indeed, he appears to have made my case for me.

What's worse, whenever you try to assign rights to entities that
don't possess them, you inevitably water down the rights of those who
dowhich may, of course, be the goal of at least some of the
players.

But probably not Steve.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has
been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics
of self-defense. He is the author of more than 25 books, including
The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability
Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles
and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased
through his website "The Webley Page" at
lneilsmith.org.

Neil is presently at work on Ares, the middle volume
of the epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Where We Stand:
Libertarian Policy in a Time of Crisis with his daughter, Rylla.

See stunning full-color graphic-novelizations of The
Probability Broach and Roswell, Texas which feature the
art of Scott Bieser at www.BigHeadPress.com
Dead-tree versions may be had through the publisher, or at
www.Amazon.com where you will also find Phoenix Pick editions
of some of Neil's earlier novels. Links to Neil's books at
Amazon.com are on his website